Cats and Dogs Living Together…
MASS HYSTERIA!!!
This is what it is to be a Detroit sports fan right now. Let’s take a deeper look:
1. The Detroit Red Wings win the President’s Trophy for the league’s best regular season record and go down in six games to the Edmonton Oilers. (Including blowing a two goal lead in the third period of Game 6.)
2. The Detroit Pistons finished with a franchise record for wins and the best record in the NBA. They cruised against the Bucks in the first round, cruised in the first game and the first three quarters of Game 2. Since then the Cavaliers have beat their brains in and the teams is now on the verge of playoff oblivion.
3. This is the one that has me buying bottled water and canned goods and consulting a few priests (and rabbis, and a bunch of other religious types). The Detroit Tigers have the best record in all of major league baseball. (I’ll pause a moment so that you can finish screaming in terror.) They are #1… In baseball… Major League Baseball. Seriously. You can’t make this kind of thing up.
Seriously, have the seas turned to blood? Are the dead rising from the grave? Has Bush resigned from office after realizing his own incompetence? Has the country finally realized that daytime talk shows and reality TV is for pure shit? Just what is happening out there?
This is the damndest April and May I have ever seen. Granted, I do think the Tigers run will slow eventually. They’re for real, but they’re not best team in baseball for real. At this point, however, I do think they’ll finish ahead of Cleveland for the second place in the division and I think they’ll compete for the wild card all the way to the end. Then there’s the Pistons.
There should be an episode of Without a Trace dedicated to this team right now. They have absolutely gone MIA. The guys on the court the past three games are not the same guys I watched all season long. I still have zero doubt they can pull this series out and get back on track, but to do that they have to remember who they are and start playing like it again.
That, however, is to take nothing away from the Cavaliers and the job Lebron James has done. The Jordan comparisons are bcoming more and more valide by the game, but for me there’s a huge difference: I hated Jordan. Hated him. I still don’t much care forhim. But my respect for James has gone up a million fold during this series. This guy is a champion being born before our eyes and it’s something to behold. And he’s barely old enough to drink. For a kid to have the kind of maturity and leadership James has, especially given what his life has been like, having been in the national spotlight since high school… it’s simply amazing that he seems to have such a good head on his shoulders. In this day and age, that’s amazing to me. If the Cavs do dispatch the Pistons in this series I will have no trouble rooting for them to go the rest of the way. (Did I mention that I also hate the Miami Heat? Hate ‘em. I do… a lot.)
That said, go Pistons! Please don’t rip my still beating heart of my chest tonight. This season has been too damn special to just watch it fizzle like this in the second round to an opponent that, while determined and talented, should be inferior to them in the here and now.
May 19th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
The Pistons need to look to McDyess. He seems like the only one trying out there.
I do hope they pull it out, if just to shut up the LeBron idolotry. Yes, he’s good. No, he is not Jordan, or Magic, or whatever flavor-of-the-month comparison currently popular. His game was not possible ten or twenty years ago - you can’t compare eras.
I just wish people would talk about him in terms of who he competes with, and that’s it.
Go Pistons!
(That feels weird - I’m an old school Boston fan and cheering for anything vaguely related to the Bad Boys is unsettling.)